Are Artists Liars?

Humans are natural-born storytellers, so lying is in our blood. Ian Leslie considers how this comes out in our art ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to be called “Lying for a Living”. On the surviving footage, Brando can be seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from the Los Angeles street and persuaded them to improvise (the footage is said to include a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). “If you can lie, you can act,” Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer for Rolling Stone and one of the few people to have viewed the footage. “Are you good at lying?” asked Kaftan. “Jesus,” said Brando, “I’m fabulous at it.”

Brando was not the first person to note that the line between an artist and a liar is a fine one. If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a lower order—as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have observed. Both liars and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of belief—a skill requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control (liars are writers and performers of their own work). Such parallels are hardly coincidental, as I discovered while researching my book on lying. Indeed, lying and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological root—one that is exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment.

A case study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the story of a middle-aged woman with brain damage caused by a series of strokes. She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent speech, but what she actually said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge of contemporary events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. This patient spontaneously described a blissful holiday she had taken in the islands, involving long strolls with her husband and the purchase of local trinkets from a shop. Asked what language was spoken there, she replied, “Falklandese. What else?”

In the language of psychiatry, this woman was ‘confabulating’. Chronic confabulation is a rare type of memory problem that affects a small proportion of brain-damaged people. In the literature it is defined as “the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive”. Whereas amnesiacs make errors of omission—there are gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fill—confabulators make errors of commission: they make things up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing.

Confabulating patients are nearly always oblivious to their own condition, and will earnestly give absurdly implausible explanations of why they’re in hospital, or talking to a doctor. One patient, asked about his surgical scar, explained that during the second world war he surprised a teenage girl who shot him three times in the head, killing him, only for surgery to bring him back to life. The same patient, when asked about his family, described how at various times they had died in his arms, or had been killed before his eyes. Others tell yet more fantastical tales, about trips to the moon, fighting alongside Alexander in India or seeing Jesus on the Cross. Confabulators aren’t out to deceive. They engage in what Morris Moscovitch, a neuropsychologist, calls “honest lying”. Uncertain, and obscurely distressed by their uncertainty, they are seized by a “compulsion to narrate”: a deep-seated need to shape, order and explain what they do not understand.

As with the woman who told of her holiday in the Falklands, the stories spun by chronic confabulators are conjured up instantaneously—an interlocutor only has to ask a question, or say a particular word, and they’re off, like a jazz saxophonist using a phrase thrown out by his pianist as the start of his solo. A patient might explain to her visiting friend that she’s in hospital because she now works as a psychiatrist, that the man standing next to her (the real doctor) is her assistant, and they are about to visit a patient. Chronic confabulators are often highly inventive at the verbal level, jamming together words in nonsensical but suggestive ways: one patient, when asked what happened to Queen Marie Antoinette of France, answered that she had been “suicided” by her family. In a sense, these patients are like novelists, as described by Henry James: people on whom “nothing is wasted”. Unlike writers, however, they have little or no control over their own material.

Chronic confabulation is usually associated with damage to the brain’s frontal lobes, particularly the region responsible for self-regulation and self-censoring. Of course we all are sensitive to associations—hear the word “scar” and you too might think about war wounds, old movies or tales of near-death experiences. But rarely do we let these random thoughts reach consciousness, and fewer still would ever articulate them. We self-censor for the sake of truth, sense and social appropriateness. Chronic confabulators can’t do this. They randomly combine real memories with stray thoughts, wishes and hopes, and summon up a story from the confusion.

The wider significance of this condition is what it tells us about ourselves. Evidently there is a gushing river of verbal creativity in the normal human mind, from which both artistic invention and lying are drawn. We are born storytellers, spinning narrative out of our experience and imagination, straining against the leash that keeps us tethered to reality. This is a wonderful thing; it is what gives us our ability to conceive of alternative futures and different worlds. And it helps us to understand our own lives through the entertaining stories of others. But it can lead us into trouble, particularly when we try to persuade others that our inventions are real. Most of the time, as our stories bubble up to consciousness, we exercise our cerebral censors, controlling which stories we tell, and to whom. Yet people lie for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that confabulating can be dangerously fun.

During a now-famous libel case in 1996, Jonathan Aitken, a former cabinet minister, recounted a tale to illustrate the horrors he endured after a national newspaper tainted his name. He told of how, on leaving his home in Westminster one morning with his teenage daughter, he found himself ‘stampeded’ by a documentary crew. Upset and scared by the crew’s aggressive behaviour, his daughter burst into tears, he said, and Aitken bundled her into his ministerial car. But as they drove away he realised that they were being followed by the journalists in their van. A hair-raising chase across central London ensued. The journalists were only shaken off when Aitken executed a cunning deception: he stopped at the Spanish embassy and swapped vehicles.

The case, which stretched on for more than two years, involved a series of claims made by the Guardian about Aitken’s relationships with Saudi arms dealers, including meetings he allegedly held with them on a trip to Paris while he was a government minister. What amazed many in hindsight was the sheer superfluity of the lies Aitken told during his testimony. Some were necessary to maintain his original lie, but others were told, it appeared, for the sheer thrill of invention. As Aitken stood at the witness stand and piled lie upon lie—apparently carried away by the improvisatory act of creativity—it’s possible that he felt similar to Brando during one of his performances. Aitken’s case collapsed in June 1997, when the defence finally found indisputable evidence about his Paris trip. Until then, Aitken’s charm, fluency and flair for theatrical displays of sincerity looked as if they might bring him victory. The first big dent in his façade came just days before, when a documentary crew submitted the unedited rushes of their “stampede” encounter with Aitken outside his home. They revealed that not only was Aitken’s daughter not with him that day (when he was indeed doorstepped), but also that the minister had simply got into his car and drove off, with no vehicle in pursuit.

Of course, unlike Aitken, actors, playwrights and novelists are not literally attempting to deceive us, because the rules are laid out in advance: come to the theatre, or open this book, and we’ll lie to you. Perhaps this is why we felt it necessary to invent art in the first place: as a safe space into which our lies can be corralled, and channelled into something socially useful. Given the universal compulsion to tell stories, art is the best way to refine and enjoy the particularly outlandish or insightful ones. But that is not the whole story. The key way in which artistic “lies” differ from normal lies, and from the “honest lying” of chronic confabulators, is that they have a meaning and resonance beyond their creator. The liar lies on behalf of himself; the artist tell lies on behalf of everyone. If writers have a compulsion to narrate, they compel themselves to find insights about the human condition. Mario Vargas Llosa has written that novels “express a curious truth that can only be expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, masquerading as what it is not”. Art is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth.

Ian Leslie is the author of "Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit", published by Quercus and out now in Britain. He can be followed on Twitter at @mrianleslie. Picture credit: procsilas and jesus_leon (both via Flickr)

"If we could prove string theory wrong, I would be thrilled!"

For the special Science issue of the New Statesman,  Helen Lewis-Hasteley interviewed Brian Greene, one of the most compelling and interesting advocates of string theory. The interview is now online, but if you'd like a more in-depth look at some of the concepts that were discussed, here's the longer Q&A. In it multiverses, extra dimensions - and the time Greene wrote dialogue for Third Rock For The Sun are discussed.

Why did you choose to write about multiverse in The Hidden Reality?

I think it's the most exciting subject at the frontier of physics research today. It is a highly speculative subject, but I don't shrink from speculative subjects. I think they're fascinating to explore, and this one in particular - the possibility that there are other universes - has really bubbled up in the past few years, and captured the attention of mainstream physicists who have been searching for the unified theory.

We don't know if these ideas are correct but they are sufficiently mathematically compelling that we're taking them seriously. I wanted to give the general public a snapshot of some exciting physics that may be the gateway to a fantastically new view of reality.


To what extent are these ideas becoming accepted now?

I wouldn't say "accepted", that would be a bit strong. What I would say is that we all recognise that these ideas could be wrong. But when our mathematical calculations bump into these ideas repeatedly from a whole variety of different angles, when it's not that we have some crazy idea about the universe that we try to impose on these theories, but rather the math leads us to this possibility.

Actually that is why we are willing to take these ideas seriously and investigate them. But until there's observational evidence or experimental proof, we won't know if this math describes reality, or is simply interesting math which may be interesting to mathematicians but not to physicists.


Which strands of physics lead you to the idea of the multiverse?

From cosmological physics, unified theories, relativity, quantum mechanics, computational physics. In the book I cover nine variations on the theme of multiverse proposals because there are these different avenues that when followed sufficiently far take you to this idea.
If you like I can give you some specific examples of how this happens. So, in cosmology, the big bang is a theory about how the universe evolved, from whatever caused the outward swelling of space to occur in the first place. We have been struggling for a long time to fill in a missing piece. What did cause the outward swelling to start?

In recent years, a proposal has been slowly developed for what may have driven an outward swelling. But here's the thing, when we study the math for that proposal, it naturally suggests that the big bang, that outward swelling, is not a one-time event. It may have been a many time event, with many big bangs in many different universes.

Our universe in that picture would be the aftermath of one big bang, but there'd be other universes which resulted from those other big bangs. I like to think about it as our universe is one expanding bubble in a grand cosmic bubble bath where the other bubbles are other universes.


Different big bangs temporally or spatially?

Both. In fact it's very hard to talk about time, when applied to the whole collection. We understand time in our universe. But how does time in our universe relate to time in the other universes, and perhaps some more overarching notion of time that would embrace everything? We don't know the answer to that.

So when you say before or after, roughly speaking, I'm happy to say yes but if you press me really hard, I would have difficulty even defining before and after when discussing time beyond our little bubble universe. That's a little mind-blowing!


You talk about examples where people have read The Elegant Universe and show up at your graduate class.

It's not a common occurrence but it does happen...more often it happens when people send me their manuscript. Not long ago I got a manuscript from somebody who'd read The Elegant Universe who for ten years was working in his basement trying to take the ideas to the next step.

He wrote how his wife almost left him because he wouldn't come out of the basement, and the painful thing to me was, I think most people realise that these books are a translation from the mathematics to the ordinary language to give a feel for the ideas. It was heartbreaking.


The actual process of doing theoretical physics, how does it work?

Usually it's a fairly communal activity. For instance I have a group of students, grad students, post-docs from the faculty, and we're constantly at the blackboard discussing ideas, throwing things back and forth, reading papers that others around the world have posted into the archive.

Every morning we go there to see what papers have been posted from the previous night. We read those papers, we think about how mathematical ideas there might be relevant to us, can we push somebody's idea further. So it's a very incremental process, with a lot of conversation and cross-talk happening really throughout the world on these ideas. So the notion of the lone individual with the solitude of their own mind at their desk trying to figure out the universe is a nice romantic image, but is usually not the way we work in practice.


And when you talk and share ideas do you talk in equations, or do you find it useful to use metaphors?

It's almost always in mathematics. Many of us do find it useful to have a mental picture of the mathematics. Personally if my understanding of a subject is solely based on the equations, I feel like I don't fully get it. Yes, I see the math, I understand the math, and that ultimately is what I'll ultimately rely on to make progress and to gain further insight, but I like in my mind to have a mental picture, a visualisation of what's going on.

And frankly when I write these books, what I do is, I revert to those very mental images that I've developed over a long period of time of thinking about this material. I strip away the mathematics, put it in the end notes or don't have it there at all. Then take the visualisation and try to develop them in a way that will be interesting, a story, a metaphor ... something that will add life to the ideas that builds a bridge from the everyday to the exotic.


How do you try and put into language things we can't even describe with maths yet?

Well, that's pretty tough. And often even if we don't have the full mathematical formulation of something, we have a mathematical trajectory. We understand certain mathematical ideas, and we can see where they're pointing, and even if we haven't developed the full rigorous math for where we believe we're headed, the trajectory is often enough to build a coherent metaphor for where we're going.

But there are some ideas, for instance, we all know that matter is made of atoms and molecules, and one of the ideas I discuss even in this book, is that we wonder whether space and time might themselves be made of molecules and atoms, of a sort, it can't be the same molecules and atoms that make up tables and chairs, but could there be a finer entity from which space and time are built? That's a hard idea to get your head around, but using the analogy with the ordinary matter, even though we don't have the mathematical version of the story - that's what we're struggling now to comprehend - I think you can get the idea that if this table is made up of finer ingredients, could the environment that we're immersed within be made up of finer ingredients?


A fabric of space-time itself?

That's the language we use. And the question is how literal should you interpret that metaphor, is it a real fabric? Or is that just the poetic language we use to describe the environment within which we're immersed? In many ways the work of Einstein that we're carrying on today suggests that it is a real fabric in some ways. It's not as tangible as an ordinary piece of fabric.

When I try to grab space it's eluding me right now, whereas this isn't eluding me, when I grab the lapel of my coat. But there are ways in which experiments have shown that space behaves very similar to fabric. For instance, if you go near a spinning black hole, you can show with experiments that space seems to be dragged around the spinning black hole, much as would happen if I had a pebble and a vat of molasses. As the pebble spins, the molasses spins with it. The experiments show that space is enough of a real thing that it begins to spin too.


Even in a vacuum?

Yeah!


I suppose that whole idea of gravity and the deformation that makes implies there is something to deform.

That is an even simpler version, absolutely. Right! The very image that you have - here's the sun, and the fabric sort of warps around it, well if there wasn't a fabric, what's doing the warping. What is that thing that's taking on a curved shape? And that is what drove Einstein to talk about the space-time fabric, the space-time continuum.

So I guess the overall lesson is, we've been fortunate that many of the ideas that have played a critical role in the advancement of understanding the universe, have analogies in the everyday world, that while imperfect to be sure - every analogy is imperfect - are at least pretty good at communicating the flavour of the idea.


So what is the point of knowing this?

My mom says: 'Why aren't you a doctor?". And I'm like "I am a doctor!" and she's all: "No, no, not that kind of doctor, I mean a real doctor". She reads my books sort of, but she basically says they give her a headache.

I think that many of us, at one level or another, are searching for meaning. Why are we here? Where do we come from? Is there a purpose to it all? And I don't think science can answer the purpose question. I don't think science is well suited to providing direct pronouncements on meaning. But I do think that if you are investigating these issues, it's critical to know where they're taking place. What is this universe? How did it come into existence?

Maybe we can't answer why it's here, but I think we can answer how it came to be. And how it will evolve. And that, to me, is a vital part of being able to even start to think about meaning. Personally, the reason I get up in the morning is these questions and the progress we're making is so exciting that that's meaning enough for me. I feel part of why I'm here is to immerse myself in the mysteries and to contribute what little I can to unravelling them.

I think that journey - that view of science as a living, breathing, evolving, exciting journey, the drama of adventure and discovery, the journey from confusion to at least partial understanding - is a thrilling one. And these books can at least give you a snapshot of that process which gives you a completely different feel from physics than what you'd get from a textbook.


My husband said The Elegant Universe is what got him through A-level physics. The idea that it wasn't just about rote learning, it was about ideas and exploration.

Exactly. I've been saying a lot lately, more back home than here, that a big problem with our educational system in the US and perhaps here too, I'm not sure, is that in the classroom, we immediately focus in on the details. To solve equations, to balance reactions, know parts of the cell, largely because that's the material that's easy to test, and that's what we do.

And I've been saying, and I feel so strongly, you've got to have a commensurate focus on the big wondrous ideas. How did the universe begin? How did light begin? How did consciousness begin? Those are the ideas that make one want to learn the details in order to perhaps make one understand those questions more fully, and we don't do enough of that by any means.

In British schools, because testing is such a large part of how we teach, it perhaps becomes "here are three things you've learned and let's find out if you remember them tomorrow" and it certainly does physics a disservice.

I've had the experience where I'm talking to kids, and I began to explain aspects of black holes, aspects of the big bang, aspects of quantum physics, and after five minutes, I find that their eyes open wide and they're like 'that's science?'

Because to them science wasn't exciting, mind-bending ideas, it was memorising certain things so that they could regurgitate them on a test. And to me, I got to tell you, it's heart breaking.

That a subject that could be the primary driver of imagination, the primary driver of interest in excelling academically, is so often viewed as the subject to stay away from. Boring, dry, dull, intimidating, who needs it? And that is a failure of the way we communicate the ideas.

There's a big problem in this country that it's very hard to get children to do what are seen as 'hard' subjects, particularly as the focus is so much on grades, and grades get you into university. If you were going to do an arts degree like I did, why would you do a hard subject like physics which is going to drag you down.


You wrote a children's book, could you tell me about that?

Well it's a reimagining of the myth of Icarus which, I don't know when, or if people encounter it here, but I came upon it at a pretty young age, and found it very distressing because in my naïveté it was simply a story about a boy who was bucking authority, not doing what his father was saying and paying the ultimate price for that which seemed wrong to me.

And as I got older and became a scientist it seemed yet more off base because in order to have great breakthroughs and insights in science, you've got to go against what the elders are saying, you've got to be courageous and go off on your own, even into uncharted territory. That might me quite dangerous, but you don't pay with your life.

The price you pay for great discovery is you and society often have to acclimate to a new reality, right? In the atomic age we learned how to split the atom, we learned how to harness nuclear power. We are obviously still struggling with that move into the nuclear age right now, obviously. The biological age - we learn how to understand DNA and the genome, and now we're struggling how to figure out what to do with that knowledge.

That's what happens, we have to acclimate to new reality. So my version of the Icarus myth, that's what happens. The boy doesn't go to the sun with wax wings, he builds a spaceship and against his father's warning he flies to a black hole. And what happens at the black hole is purely scientific, not science fiction, not fantasy. To travel to a black hole, that is fiction today, but the real physics of Einstein's general theory of relativity dictates what happens.

The boy spends an hour or two near the black hole on a joyride, going round the outskirts careful not to fall in. And what Einstein taught us is that time flows down over the edge of a black hole. So what is an hour for this futuristic Icarus, when he comes back and he wants to show his dad what he's done, he learns quickly that 10 000 years have gone by for everybody else, because while time is running slow for him, it was running at the everyday speed for everybody else, so his dad is long gone, and he has to acclimate to this new reality.

And that to me is what the process of courageous exploration leads to. So that's what the story is, and it's a way in which young kids can actually learn a real piece of science, this time slowing at a black hole is real. But do it in a way where it's emotionally compelling, because it's a story, and it's a story of exploration and loss.


And I read that you helped out with the dialogue on Third Rock from the Sun...

It's true in the most minimal sense. There was one episode in which John Lithgow was growing tired of speaking physics babble without it meaning anything in physics so one of the writers who actually I grew up with, wrote to me somewhat frantically, "can you give us 18 words of real physics that might slot into this little moment so that John Lithgow is actually saying something real". So I did, and the amazing thing is I don't watch the show, but one day, years ago I was just channel surfing mindlessly, and I look in the programme and I see the equation of quantum thermodynamics on the blackboard, so I turn up the volume and it's the words I wrote! It was one of my proudest moments!


Do you have a scientific hero?

Pretty much the one you'd think. The thing about Einstein is, almost everything that I do, and almost everything that modern physicists do, in one way or another leads back to Einstein. It's kind of astounding.

We looked at the world one way in, say, 1900, and by 1955 when Einstein left the scene, we looked at it a completely different way. The big developments, special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, all are traceable back to Einstein in one form or another. And even today, as we seek a unified theory, we're trying to put together general relativity and quantum mechanics - two threads that if you trace them back they end up with Einstein, so yes Einstein is a vital figure in everything that we've done.


And in terms of scientists working today, whose work do you find most exciting?

There are a lot of great creative physicists out there. Certainly Edward Witten from the institute for Advanced Study, has for a long time been the leader in pushing the frontiers of working unification.

So many of us revere him, but it needs to be said because I've sometimes seen this reported in a slightly odd way, it's not that way we revere Einstein the way some gurus of new age cults may be revered, or some religious leaders, no, we constantly are critical of everyone's contributions, even Witten's. We look at a given paper, we examine it from all different perspectives, we bang it around, we knock it, we try to break it, we try to see what aspects of it are pointing towards the new direction.

So we're a highly critical bunch, a highly sceptical bunch. So when we have someone that we respect enormously, it doesn't mean that we take in their pronouncements in some uncritical way, not at all.


So you have standard model physics which is quite well supported, and string theory is slightly more suggestive...

I would say hugely more. Again, let me just interject one thing, for you to ask me as you may: "Do I believe in string theory?", my answer is, '"No, I don't". I don't believe anything at all until it is experimentally proven, observationally confirmed. I do find string theory the most compelling approach to the search for a unified theory, for putting gravity and quantum mechanics together and that's why I've spent time thinking about it. If you were to ask me, "Do I believe there are other universes out there?" - no, I don't. Do I think it's a compelling possibility that emerges from the mathematics and am I willing to take it very seriously and vigorously pursue it? Yes. But I won't believe it until there is that observational, experimental support.


It's an important thing to say that as a scientist you can't believe anything without evidence...or it's not a question of belief...

That's right, the better word in fact is 'confidence'. Because no matter how much experimental support a given theory may have, maybe you can confirm it on the 999th experiment, the 1000th experiment, but the 1001st might yield an anomaly! The results of that experiment might not agree with the theory, and that shows that a theory that you thought to be correct, wasn't. And that's common in physics, this is what happens.


Do you feel an emotional investment in it? What if string theory turned out to be a little cul-de-sac?

If we were able to show string theory wrong, and that is what science can do. It can't prove something right, because again the experiments way down the line might suddenly deviate. But you can prove something wrong if you have experimental evidence that simply deviates from the predictions of a given theory, you wipe it out. If we could prove string theory wrong, I would be thrilled. And I don't mean that in an offhanded way. My emotional investment is finding truth, making progress towards a deeper understanding of how the world works.

And if string theory is wrong, I would like to know that, I'd like to have known that yesterday. But if we can show it today or tomorrow, fantastic! We would push it to the side and that would allow us to focus our attention on approaches that have a better chance of revealing truth. So that's where the emotional investment is. It's not in any particular theory, it's in contributing in whatever small way, to the journey that we've been on since the Ancient Greeks, and that's what it's about.


How do you balance your role between researching and communicating to a wider audience? Where do you see yourself more at the moment?

I definitely see myself more as a scientist who, every so often, steps outside of the research environment to bring a 'report from the trenches', if you will. My last book, The Fabric of the Cosmos, was seven years ago, in 2004, and my last television show, The Elegant Universe, was eight years ago. It has been a long time since I have stepped outside to do what I am doing now. It is virtually impossible, when you are in the last throes of writing a book and then out there discussing the book, to get any research done. For a good chunk of time, six months or so, you have to write the research off. But, when this periods ends, which will be relatively soon, I will go back and it will be a while before I come out in a significant making.


What area of research will you back to?

I work in String Theory which speaks to this possibility of other universes. The String theoretic version focuses upon the need for extra dimensions of space in String Theory, an idea that I have been working since I was a graduate student at Oxford in the 1980s. But the aspect that we are focusing upon now is: could it be there are many different universes, each with a different shape for the extra dimensions, and from that they will have each different physical features and properties. And we are trying to understand detailed phenomena like: 'Can the shape of the extra dimensions change over time through quantum processes?', that is one thing we are doing detailed calculus on. That is the arena in which my attention is scientifically focused.


I understand we need those extra dimensions to make sense of the maths. The maths of what?

The mathematics of String Theory falls apart if there are not these extra dimensions. It turns out that the maths requires that, left-right, back-forth and up-down [sic] - the three common dimensions - not be the only ones. The thing is, the maths does exactly not tell us what those extra dimensions look like. We believe they must be curled up and very small because we cannot see them, so this is a way to make this prediction compatible with our observation.

Our eyes only see the big dimensions, the ones that are accessible, but beyond those there are others that escape detection because they are so small. But the exact shape of the extra dimensions has a profound impact on things that can see like what the electron weighs, its mass, the strength of gravity, the strength of the electromagnetic force, all these features of the world that we measure in String Theory would be traced to the shape of the extra dimensions.

So a big challenge, for decades now, has been to figure out the shape of the extra dimensions and we were unable to nail that problem. We found candidate shapes, in fact a huge number of them. They are called Calabi-Yau manifolds. When I was a graduate student in Oxford, there were five known. My thesis took one of those shapes and did that mathematical analysis. The resulting physics did not agree with the observations but it was just a first test case. The problem was, when turned back to the list of shapes to look at the second, the list had grown. It was not longer five possible shapes, it was a hundred, then a thousand, then ten thousand.

Ten thousand is still potentially doable, it would keep an army of graduate students busy for a while trying to work out the consequences of these shapes, but the number of shapes continued to grow. Nowadays it has reached 10 [to the power of] 500 which is an unimaginably huge number. The number of particles in the observable universe is about 10 [to the power of] 80, this dwarves even that. You would need far more graduate students than there are particles that make up the universe.

So what do you do? Some String theorists responded to this by saying: 'I am out of here, I am going to work in something else. If you have some many shapes, each gives rise to different physics and you do not know which one is the right one so you are never going to to be able to make any definitive predictions'. Others, like me, have been saying: 'Do not quit, it is early in the game, we need to develop the maths and that will hopefully give us ad equation that picks out one of those shapes as the shape. Then will study it and, if the predictions agree with what we see, great, if not, then we can discard the whole structure.

A third group - which is what I focus on in the book - have suggested a more radical proposal. Those physicists have said: 'Take seriously the failure to pick out one shape from the many, maybe that is telling there is no unique shape. Maybe the maths is really telling us that there are many universes where each of those shapes is in the limelight, where each of them gets its due'.

So the reason we have not been able to pick one out is that there is no unique special one. The only thing special about the shape in our domain is that the physics such that it allows our form of life to exist, stars, planets and galaxies, here. In those universes with different shapes, the physics is so vastly different that there are not any stars, planets or people. But that is the only thing that is special about this one: we can be here to think about these questions.


Does the idea that something happens in every possible universe have any implications on the concept of free will?

I think it does, but I do not know that the philosophical ideas are actually that different from the ones which would emerge from Newtonian physics. Even in the Newtonian world, it is hard to see where there is free will.

When we look at the equations that have come down to us from the last few hundred years, those equations tell how they are now and how they will be in five minutes. Where does free will affect where they will be in five minutes? We do not see free will in the equations. I think that you and I are just particles governed by particular laws.

In Newtonian terms, it is very clear, there is no free will. The Quantum mechanics comes along and people think that maybe that is where there is free will because, now, there is a fuzziness, there are many possible outcomes. Maybe free will enters there, but it does not, because, in the Quantum equation, there is still absolute determinism of what will happen in a probabilistic sense: the equations say, with absolute certainty, there is a 30 per cent of this, a 20 per cent chance of that, 50 per cent chance of that... Nowhere does free will come in into those equations either.

The only place where free will may still have a last fighting chance to emerge, is in something which we do not yet understand: how, in Quantum physics, do we go from this many possible outcomes to the one definite outcome that we observe. In that so-called Quantum measurement problem, which is still a puzzle, you could imagine that, maybe, free will emerge. I doubt it, but the standard free-willer could say that is where it will happen. In the many worlds approach to this world which I describe in this book, certainly there is no free will happening, as I can see it.

Every individual, when faced with five different choices, if each are allowed by the laws of physics, in quantum physics, each of those outcomes would happen. The individual would make all five choices, one per universe. And it would not be that the individual has had the choice to make one choice more real than the other, all of the choices would be as real as the others, they would take place in the different universes. There would not be any volitional choice involved in what happens.


Could you not at least say that "I" in "this" universe am tacking my own way through?
Not really, because you are following one trajectory of choices. It is not as though there was a place in the mathematics where your free will dictated that particular set of choices. You are knocked around by the laws of physics just like all your copies in the other universes.


Is there a moment you can pin-point from which you were interested in this kind of subjects?

When I was really young, I was five, my dad taught the basic operations multiplications which I found really exciting because it meant you could do calculations that no one had ever really done before. They had not been done before because they were not interesting to do, but to me to create a new sequence of numbers on a page from multiplying - my dad would set 30-digit by 30-digit multiplication tables and I would buy huge pieces of construction paper, tape them together and spend the weekend doing these calculations. To me it was so exciting to have an answer that no one had looked at before.

That is where my interest in maths took off. When I learned, later on, that maths were no just a game - I remember at some point sooner after, when I learned multiplications, my dad asked me to calculate the number of inches between here and the Andromeda galaxy. That is a very straightforward calculation because people know how far away it is in light-years, then you just need to convert light-years into miles, miles into feet and feet into inches, so it is just a sequence of multiplications. But, to get that number at the and look at it, I was like: "Wow, that is relevant to what is out there". It hooked me for good, when that link to the real world was made.


Was your father interested in maths?

He was definitely interested. He dropped out of high school to be a musician. He was a singer, performer, composer, vocal coach... he liked to say that he had an 'SPHD': Seward Park High school Dropout, which is where he dropped out. But he was self-taught and because of that, his interest came from a very self-motivated place. Because of that, he was constantly telling me about atoms and the universe, and in retrospect, some of that stuff was right, some was not, but it did not matter. It got me interested in the wider universe


What was your experience of learning maths and physics at school?

I had some pretty good teachers, not all of them, but I can pin point a couple that recognised I had some ability and would give me work to do outside of the class: go home and work my way through various texts that the gave me to allow to keep this enthusiasm and interest going. They were vital to me, in fact - as a sidebar - when I was in seventh grade, I went to a public [as in state] school, I did not go to a specialised private school and I had exhausted what that public school could offer.

The teacher said: "Why don't you go to Columbia University?". He wrote me a little note. I was this tall, my sister was three heads taller, she went with me. We just knocked on doors randomly and we would hand them this note. The note basically said: "Take this kid on, he is hungry to learn". And most people we gave this would say "oh that's nice" and give it back.

They were busy obviously, but one guy in the maths department - he was a graduate student - said "sure, come". All summer I met him every day and then I carried on during the academic year subsequently once a week. For no money - we did not have any money - but he just did this for the love of learning, the love of teaching. He took me to mathematical places that I would not have visited, for five to ten years if I had just followed the traditional education. So it was a wonderful thing for me.


That is wonderful because without it, presumably, you might just run into a dead end...

And joined some gang and just been a street thug, it is possible.


You present nine versions of the multiverse. Is there one that intuitively seems to you more attractive than the others? Is intuition a useful concept or should you struggle against it?

I think one of the big lessons of modern physics and certainly the idea of this book is that perception of the everyday world can be a very misleading guide the true nature of what is out there. And there is a way in which that is startling, because we all think we know the world! We look around!

On the other hand, if you think about it, when we were back there in the Savannah, trying to get our next meal, understanding the true nature of reality would not really have helped us. Would it have helped to know electrons can be sort of be at two places at once in a quantum world? Would it have helped us to know about the nature of time near a black hole? No! We just needed where that antelope was going to be in five seconds so we can capture it and eat it.

Having said that, we need to inform ourselves by mathematic s and observation and experimentation. That goes beyond our senses and that is what we are doing. So I do no consider these other parallel particularly universes. So the yardstick that I would use is not really intuition, but rather which of these proposals has the best chance of being tested in the shortest timescale. And for that I would place my focus on the brane multiverse - the idea which comes from string theory that we may be living in a giant three-dimensional membrane.

The easier way of thinking about it is to suppress one dimension and thinking about it to make it more intuitive and imagining our universes taking place in a big slice of bread. The idea according to string theory is there could be other slices of bread, other universes out there, maybe even real nearby, all part of the big cosmic loaf. But we are not aware of these other slices of bread because it turns out that light cannot travel between them, so we a re blind to their existence.

However this is a testable idea - at least in principle - at the Large Hadron Collider, the big accelerator in Geneva, because when protons slam against each other at high speed, the maths shows that debris can be created that would be ejected off of our universe, off of our brane, off of our slice of bread. If that happened, how would we know? The debris would take some energy with it which means our detectors, which are on our slice of bread, would miss that energy and measure less energy than before. A missing energy signature, that physicists are now looking for.


Presumably, the big problem with that, is that something else could have taken the energy away.

That is the challenge and that is why the experiments get paid the big bucks. They have to be able to close all those loopholes.


The Higgs Boson has been described as a 'god particle' that would suddenly make everything clear. Is that not a bit simplistic?

No, I think it is a vital and important idea. It is not directly a force-carrying particle, that is not its real claim to fame. The 'God particle' concept comes from Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman. I do not like that language, it is unnecessary to inject that perspective, that is my personal view on it.

The Higgs boson would be the smallest chunk of what we call the Higgs field. If these ideas are right, the Higgs field would be like an ocean that fills all of space, and invisible ocean. Right now, this room is filled with the electromagnetic field. The reason why I can turn on my cell phone, get my messages or log on to the internet, is because these fields are right here.

The idea of a field-filling space, much like steam fills a sauna, is not an exotic idea. It is true. The exotic idea for the Higgs field is that it is a new field that we have not yet seen. What would it do? If it is correct, if this field is filling space, the idea is that as matter tries to move through space, the Higgs field exerts a friction-like drag on particles, so as I am pushing an object I feel it resisting my attempt to speed it up.

Normally we say that is the mass of the object - the bigger it is, the harder it is to push it. But where does the mass come from? According to Higgs, it comes from this object, its particles, being dragged back by this molasses-like Higgs field within which we are all immersed. So the Higgs field is meant to be the fundamental explanation for why particles have the mass that they do. And that is a drawl in the standard model of particle physics.


Has this research led you to reject the idea of 'God'?

My view is that science only has something to say about a very particular notion of God, which goes by the name of 'God of the gaps': if you are trying to understand the world around you and science has not yet given an explanation for some phenomenon, you could step back and say "oh, that is God". Then, when science does explain that phenomena - as it eventually does - God gets squeezed out because he is no longer needed to explain that phenomena.

But that is a very particular and simplistic notion of God. No matter what physics does, you can always say there is god behind it: God set up the rules the physics, God set the environment within which those rules play themselves out. Do I feel that we need that? No. Do I personally subscribe to it? I do not. But does physics rule that picture out? No it does not.

I think the appropriate response for a physicist to is to say: "I do not find the concept of God very interesting because I cannot test it, I cannot rule it out in the traditional ways and what excites me and makes me want to go to my office is to work on things that I can test". For me God is not that interesting but I do not think God is ruled out, that is a statement that is actually unjustifiable.

“A land without people for a people without land?”

Larry Gross tackles here the issues surrounding the occupier's narratives, Zionist idealism and the harsh realities of ethnic cleansing in the apartheid state of Israel...

Reflections on Israel: From Idealism to Ethnic Cleansing


In 1953 my family—my parents and their four boys, aged 4 to 12, I was 10—moved from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to Israel, where we remained for seven years. My father was what might be called a McCarthy refugee, a former Truman administration official who was also a “premature anti-fascist” (look it up) and thus not eminently employable in that chilly era of Red-hunting. I’ve since read my father’s FBI file and I know how close he came to being fingered as a former Communist Party member (my parents both left the CP after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact). My father received offers to join many other former government officials in taking overseas posts in such imperial outposts as Japan, Indonesia and Pakistan, but my mother said she wouldn’t raise her children in a “foreign nationals” bubble surrounded by servants. An offer to my father to join a group of economic advisers to the prime minister of the then 5-year-old state of Israel was another matter. To my mother, the daughter of longtime Labor Zionists, this was an appealing option, and we left the States for what was to be a two-year stint. After the two years were over, my father moved to the Hebrew University, where he taught for the next five years before we returned to the United States and I started college.

I’ve long thought that it wasn’t a bad bargain, missing out on the 1950s in the United States, by all accounts a very missable decade, and instead experiencing life in the young and then exciting and idealistic state of Israel. From the sixth grade through high school I went to Jerusalem schools, using Hebrew and absorbing a blend of nationalism and Jewish-slanted perspectives on history, within a context of widely proclaimed external threats and internal nation-building. This was a period in which education—history, geography and even Bible studies—was clearly in the service of the national enterprise. Even in the secular schools Bible study was required, but the subject largely was taught as an extension of the story of the Jews, reinforcing the connections of the Chosen People to the land, with the names of biblical places still present all around us, cementing the historical continuity we were now experiencing after 2,000 years of exile. As the familiar song went, we have come to the Land, to build and to be rebuilt in it.

Even then there were tangles in the stories that were woven through the nationalist tapestry: The barely disguised racism to which Sephardic Jews from the Arab countries were subjected, in comparison with the preferential treatment of Ashkenazi Jews from Western Europe and the United States—to my parents’ amusement, British and American Jews were routinely referred to as “Anglo-Saxons”—and the even less disguised racism directed at Arabs. Traveling with my father, whose advisory brief included public housing, to visit settlements for Sephardic immigrants—Maabarot—it was easy to see the contrast between the government’s views of various categories of olim (immigrants), and the vast difference in social services and opportunities extended. It was also easy to see that Israeli Arabs occupied a distinctly lower status.

At the same time, to be blunt, it was also clear to me that the beauty of the landscape and the indigenous architecture that seemed to grow organically on the rocky hills, a landscape and architecture that has etched itself on my soul, was the creation of the Palestinian people who had lived in these hills for generations. In contrast, the new settlements built by the Israeli government spread across the hilltops like an ugly ribbon of concrete.

The big city of the time, Tel Aviv, despite some neighborhoods with low-rise apartment buildings echoing the Bauhaus style, felt ugly and cramped and already was falling apart. Now, I know that Tel Aviv has been transformed, with skyscrapers and freeways, bright lights and nightlife, but it also looks like nearly every other modern metropolis. The adjacent Arab port of Jaffa, absorbed into a unified Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality, has been gentrified and touristed up.

The Jerusalem of my childhood was a divided city, in which the new part, the Israeli portion, was a small town I could traverse on my bicycle, avoiding the scar of barbed-wired “no man’s land” that divided it from the Jordanian-controlled Old City. Since 1967 the unified city, along with the extensive territories annexed into “Greater Jerusalem,” has grown and expanded and build up and out. High-rises have desecrated the timeless skyline of the city, as new housing settlements have covered the surrounding hills.
 
Even more striking than the sheer growth of the city is its domination by the ultra-orthodox. I recall the first riot I ever saw, in the mid-1950s, when thousands of black-suited men thronged the center of the city to protest the building of the first public swimming pool in Jerusalem. The pool was expected to permit men and women to swim at the same time, a provocation and blasphemy that roused the orthodox communities to outrage. Previously, the orthodox communities had limited themselves to barricading their streets during the Sabbath and throwing stones at cars that wandered too close to their neighborhoods. They also greeted other violations in similar fashion: I recall my mother being pelted with pebbles by small boys when she wore a sleeveless dress as we walked on a street that was the border between orthodox and secular neighborhoods. But the tensions of that time were nothing compared to the rise of religious nationalism after the 1967 Six Day War, when many ultra-orthodox groups previously hostile to Zionism—God will decide when we return to Zion, not men, they argued, and thus Zionism is presumptuous—took the Israeli victory as a sign that God now favored the Zionist enterprise, and therefore Jews had the right and indeed the obligation to settle the entire Land of Israel.

Which brings me to the crux of the issue, the Palestinian Problem. When I was a youngster learning Jewish history in Jerusalem’s schools, the story was clear and even simple. In many ways, it could be encapsulated in a saying one heard occasionally, attributed to early Zionists: “A land without people for a people without land.” Well, there are several striking problems with this aphorism, the most obvious being that there were people already living in the Holy Land, the Palestinians. This phrase originated in writings of British clergy and statesmen who viewed with favor what later became the Zionist cause, decades before Theodor Herzl wrote “The Jewish State” (see the fascinating and important article by Diana Muir on the history of the phrase).
 
Not surprising for the people who retell the ancient story of liberation from slavery in Egypt every year at Passover, the official Zionist story was frequently retold. The story I was taught in school was repeated in the nearly obligatory youth movements that organized much of our out-of-school lives (the choice was between youth movements, each aligned with a political party; not belonging to any movement carried a sentence of total social isolation). This story was also repeated on the frequent occasions for public expression of nationalistic fervor (the Zionist leaders of the day were reminiscent of Fidel Castro in their love of delivering long speeches). It was the story of the return to The Land, the Rebuilding of the Land and the People, and the continuity of Jewish identification with the Land, from biblical times to the present. The Arab residents of the land—Palestinian was not a term used at that time, either by the Jews or, as far as I can recall, by the Arabs—were generally viewed as peasants, shopkeepers or craftsmen, living in the Levantine past, neither part of the romantic Hebrew past nor the modern new state being built around them.

Then there were the “infiltrators”—Arab peasants, taken from their refugee camps in Gaza or the West Bank, armed by the cynical Egyptians or Jordanians, and sent over the border to kill Israelis, unless, as usually happened, the Israelis killed them first. I well recall spending time with my high school class doing “national service” on a kibbutz near Gaza—helping out in the fields as replacement for kibbutzniks off on military service—when the army killed several infiltrators not far from where we were working. It was a familiar story that fit with the national narrative that blamed the neighboring Arab states for the plight of the Palestinian refugees kept confined in camps reminiscent of the Maabarot, in which the Israeli government settled immigrants from Arab countries. True, of course, the Egyptian, Jordanian and Lebanese governments were callous and calculating in their realpolitik treatment of the refugees. But the larger story, and a key foundation of the mythology of Israeli nationalism, is that the refugees had not been deliberately driven out by the Israeli army in an act of what we now call ethnic cleansing.

In the Jerusalem of my youth the nicest houses by far were the Arab mansions of certain West Jerusalem neighborhoods, many of them truly beautiful examples of Eastern Mediterranean architecture, with thick stone walls, cool courtyards and tiled floors. These “abandoned” homes, technically controlled by the government as trustee for “enemy property,” were given out to politically favored or wealthy Israelis, without any visible irony or candor. I recall visiting Golda Meir’s apartment in the mid-1950s with my parents—Golda, then minister of labor, was an old friend of my Labor Zionist grandparents, and my father was consulting for her as well—which occupied the top floor of one of these mansions, its large stone-tiled balcony overlooking lush gardens. The floor below was the home of a Supreme Court justice whose son was my youth movement group leader.

Somewhat later my family became close to a young Yemenite woman who worked for us as a housekeeper (most middle-class Ashkenazi families employed Sephardic housekeepers—I heard Tel Aviv housewives refer to them as the “Schwartzeh”). We came to know her family, headed by an elderly patriarch who succeeded in marrying her off to someone she neither knew nor wanted. The family lived in Liftah, a run-down “abandoned” Arab village just below the main road at the entry to Jerusalem; a common pattern in which Jews from Arab countries were settled in former Arab villages.
 
The Israel of my youth was not only hostile to its Arab citizens and neighbors, it was also frequently contemptuous of European Jews, especially the Shtetl Jews who had been massacred in the Holocaust. I recall my grandfather’s dismay and anger at the Israeli rejection of Yiddish, truly my grandparents’ mother tongue, which was treated as a badge of the old Jewry, deformed by exile and now to be replaced by the New Jews building a new country. Long before Hannah Arendt was attacked for seeming to blame the victims for their fate under the Nazis (this was the grounds for the firestorm of criticism leveled at her “Eichmann in Jerusalem”), it was common to hear the charge that Ghetto Jews had gone like sheep to the slaughter, not fighting back as Sabras would as a matter of course. In this context, understandably, the resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto were among the most celebrated of the Holocaust victims.

While I am not sure how much of the national story I was questioning at the time I left Israel and returned to the United States, I do know I was clearly aware of the pervasive racism directed at both Arabs and Sephardic Jews. But then, I was returning to a country itself in the midst of a struggle over civil rights and still mostly unwilling to acknowledge its racist past and present. I also know that I was aware of the shallowness of the commitment to social democracy that the Israeli Labor-dominated establishment proclaimed. I had learned from my father’s experience that much of the familiar story was bogus. For example, that the kibbutz system, the crown jewel of Israel’s new society and the birthplace of much of its military-governmental elite, was artificially maintained by a system of public subsidies. And that the political deal that continued through every coalition government yielded authority over domestic life to the religious parties that joined the government, thus giving them total control over such “minor” matters as marriage, divorce and the rights of women and children. I recall accompanying my mother when she went to court to support another one of our housekeepers, who was entangled in a dispute with her abusive husband. He was refusing to give her a divorce. In the religious courts that control such matters, only a husband can grant a divorce.
 
What became even clearer in subsequent years was that single-party rule by the Labor coalition over decades had created the sort of complacent and often corrupt political system familiar from Eastern Europe, in which bureaucratic sludge infiltrates most corners of public institutions, and in which knowing the right person—what Israelis, in a term imported from Poland, call Protectzia—is the only key that will open the door you’ve been banging on. The systematic oppression of Sephardic communities led to an eruption in the 1970s, when young people organized their version of the Black Panthers, and then finally to the political upheaval in which the Labor government’s rule was finally ended. As it turned out, the new governing bloc, Menachem Begin’s right-wing coalition, was only slightly more accommodating to the “Eastern communities” that voted them in, but that’s another, also familiar story.

The dividing line in the history of Israel, and the region, of course, is the 1967 war in which Israel defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria, capturing the Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. By this time, I was living in New York, attending graduate school, and I recall following the news of the war and, as it drew to a close, thinking that most subsequent challenges could be resolved, except for the future of Jerusalem. As it turns out, I was overly optimistic, as almost everything has been mishandled, either by the Israelis or, in many cases, the Arab neighbors and the various Palestinian factions that have emerged. In a famous line Israeli diplomat Abba Eban used to characterize the Palestinians, but that could more accurately be applied to all parties to the dispute, they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

As has often been noted, it was Israel that largely created the sense of Palestinian national identity as a political force. In a famous Israeli short story I read in high school, a kibbutznik argues that there is no Jewish history, because Jews have always been reacting to what the Goyim have done to them—chased them from country to country, limited the occupations permitted to them, attacked their communities and confiscated their wealth. This account can be applied as well to the relationship between the Palestinians and Israel.

AP / Muhammed Muheisen

Backdropped by a section of Israel’s separation barrier, Israeli troops fire rubber bullets at Palestinian stone throwers, not seen, during clashes in the West Bank in 2007.

We have also learned uncomfortable truths from “revisionist” histories of the War of Independence, as it is called by Israel, as well as more recent accounts of the 1967 war and its aftermath. It turns out that the Six Day War was not forced on Israel by an overreaching Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, although his posturing, like Saddam Hussein’s decades later, played into the hands of those happy for the excuse to attack. Israeli leaders saw an opportunity and took it, under the guise of defending their nation from annihilation (see this recent account of the events of this period), as well as Miko Peled’s riveting account of the involvement of his father, Israeli Gen. Matti Peled, in these events.
 
In the aftermath of the stunning success, many Israeli leaders, including the old lion David Ben-Gurion, warned of the dangers of holding on to and occupying the conquered lands, especially the West Bank, and their warnings have proved prescient.

What I don’t believe was foreseen among the secular but nationalistic governmental/military leaders—such farm-community-raised generals as Dayan, Alon and Rabin—was the explosion of religious fundamentalism that transformed their vision of a security-based string of semi-military settlements along the Jordan River into the rash of Gush Emunim settlements that spread across the West Bank and Gaza, as well as into the Old City of Jerusalem and the center of Hebron. So was the scene set for the most intractable of human conflicts, when mutually antagonistic faith communities claim sole ownership of the same territory. Whether it’s Hindus and Muslims in India, Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, or Jews and Palestinians in the West Bank, the plot is all too familiar, and the chances for a peaceful outcome equally remote.

This, however, is not enough, as it leaves us with a false equivalence of competing claims and culpability. Israel is the occupying power, in clear contravention of international law and United Nations resolutions, and the moral consequences are as clear as they were predictable in 1967. Israel has squandered its moral integrity and corrupted the lives of generations of young folk drafted into an army of occupation.

I recall hearing stories from Holocaust survivors of the treatment of Jews in Germany and Austria in the 1930s. Not stories of concentration camps and gas chambers, although those, too, of course. But stories of legally enacted restrictions and humiliations, put in place by the government and carried out by its agents, police and soldiers, often young and often callous. Stories that are uncomfortably recalled when seeing the oppression and humiliation inflicted on Palestinians by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints; of soldiers mistreating civilians protesting the confiscation of their land and the destruction of their homes and orchards; of roads cutting through Palestinian lands that are open only to Israeli settlers; of Palestinians cut off from their own communities by a wall that cuts across the landscape like an ugly scar.

I recall visiting Germany for the first time in the late 1950s and thinking, as I looked at folks in their 30s and older, “What were you doing during that period?” I can’t help thinking that civilized folks will be asking the same question of Israelis, now and in the future.

Larry Gross is the director of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, one of the founders of queer studies and a scholar of art, media, and the portrayal of minorities.

War Against War: A Meditation on Bradley Manning’s Mind

By Scott Tucker

“Bradley Manning’s Mind.” I took a deep breath when I read that title over this brief item recently posted on Truthdig:

“An investigative video created by The Guardian examines alleged WikiLeaker Bradley Manning’s psychological condition before he was dispatched to Iraq, concluding that he was probably not fit for overseas duty and that security at his station was remarkably lax. The additional reporting provides a fuller picture of Manning’s motivations—and discloses just how easy it was for him to hijack all that classified ‘intelligence.’ ”

Without our defense, a prisoner such as Bradley Manning is defenseless against the media, the military and the government. We can at least spread the word about the Bradley Manning Support Network.

There has already been online discussion among gay folks and the queer left about the “Frontline” show that pathologized Manning, and now The Guardian video report features a soldier with blurred face saying Manning pissed in his pants and curled up on his bunk “in a fetal position.” Maybe he did, after being repeatedly insulted and assaulted by fellow soldiers, by the account of this same anonymous informant.

Why is Manning’s mind the only relevant site of weakness, disability and pathology in the big media stories so far? Why not the sorry condition of our corporate state passing as a democratic republic? And maybe the “Frontline” program, which was distributed through the Public Broadcasting Service, and The Guardian should have given us a fuller picture of the motivations that drove their own reporters to recycle the official military narrative about Bradley Manning.

If I take a detour from the very mind and person of Manning, I assure readers we’ll return to him later; by this roundabout route we may view other figures in the landscape more closely, figures who stand tall in the light of a setting sun and who throw long shadows over the republic.
 
What is the “normal” psychology of soldiers entitled to beat up someone because he’s not much above 5 feet tall and gay? Why not question what the hell is in the minds of “progressives” who will vote by rote for Barack Obama in 2012, even though he just signed an extension of the Patriot Act? Obama was far away from Washington when he used a high-tech version of the autopen (invented by Thomas Jefferson) to ratchet up surveillance of potential traitors and terrorists. In this way the corporate state casts a dumbfounding spell over the Democratic Party, but Obama’s keenest partisans can always claim that the devil made him do it. Necessity is thus the mother of “pragmatism.” The Patriot Act truly makes patriotism the last refuge of scoundrels.

A shame, really, that only Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., held out so stubbornly against the bipartisan majority on the issue of individual rights. Above all, gun rights! As Corey Boles reported in Dow Jones Newswires on May 27, “Before they moved to a vote to finalize the legislation, lawmakers first had to deal with a Paul amendment that would have excluded gun sales from law enforcement officials’ ability to monitor business transactions. Paul said this was a violation of individual rights protected by the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

Ultimately, 22 senators joined Paul in voting against the bill. (In the House of Representatives, 250 voted “yes” and 153 voted “no.”) Rand Paul is an Ayn Randian in the realm of economics, and he argued in Congress that demanding “the right to health care” means demanding the “slavery” of nurses and doctors. The “principled” opposition to the Patriot Act extension was thus spearheaded by a true believer in Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Yet the erosion of civil liberties is one ripe consequence of the very class system defended in Congress by Rand Paul, and by his “libertarian” father, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas. This erosion has advanced under both Republican and Democratic presidents. If an officially Libertarian president was elected, the real cost of the “free market” would still be gated communities for the rich and a strip-mined planet for the poor.

What about the faction that passes for the left wing of the Democrats in Congress, and what about their loyal base of voters? Did they lose their wits when the blade of a guillotine dropped all at once? No, on the contrary, a whole generation of “progressive” frogs got boiled alive one degree at a time, so they just had the strength for a croaking chorus while they thought they were getting an uncomfortably hot bath. And then that Jeffersonian autopen was wielded by the candidate of “hope and change,” a fine finishing touch to the slow crash and burn of the American republic.

Already some “progressives” are claiming the next election will be a referendum on racism, and no doubt they will be right since every big election in this country is always about both race and class. But it does not follow that Obama’s loyalists are thinking clearly about the racial construction of class politics, or that the first black president has the nerve to command his generals or to challenge the corporate state. In this respect, Obama is not much different than any other Clintonista would have been in the Oval Office, including Hillary Clinton. The testy relations between Obama and the Clintons come down to party faction fights, and not to deep disagreements on domestic and foreign policy.

The refusal to think clearly about class politics will lead us instead to think that a shattered “glass ceiling” in a corporation or in Congress or in the White House is as good or better than an uprising of class-conscious workers from below. That is precisely the level of class consciousness among so many status-conscious cultural entrepreneurs, Ivy League political imbeciles and Democratic Party apparatchiks.

Once upon a time, Bill Clinton became “our first black president,” and white liberals had full permission to be the echo chamber of words that were launched in public by novelist Toni Morrison, an African-American, writing in The New Yorker in October 1998:

"Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.

And to that list we must add that Bill Clinton was also the president who pushed policies that would have made loyal liberals cry bloody murder if he had been a Republican, including the deregulation of big banks and high finance, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and tearing down some of the last New Deal protections for mothers raising children on welfare. By Morrison’s count of black presidents, Obama should be our second; but under Morrison’s assessment, Obama never would have been elected. Clinton won many black votes by playing precisely upon the tropes of blackness (just as Morrison claimed), and Obama won many white votes by playing upon the tropes of middle-class prosperity, managerial wisdom and upward mobility.
 
In reality, both Clinton and Obama are deeply loyal to “free market” orthodoxies, and loyal as well to “pragmatism” in foreign policy. The real cost in blood and public funds comes from below, however: not from the very small minority who rise to the heights of the ruling class, but from the vast majority of working people who will never advance to a job on Wall Street or in the White House. Many millions of working people are still in shock after losing jobs, homes and any sense that this country offers them a decent social contract.

Now let’s revisit Bradley Manning, born in Crescent, Okla. (population now about 1,400). His father, Brian, had been in the Navy as an intelligence analyst. Militarism is never simply a mechanical production line of soldiers; for the assembly line depends on a great deal of ambivalence, subjectivity and uneasy loyalty at the cellular level of the neighborhood and family. In public interviews, Brian Manning seems puzzled, disappointed and frustrated that his son did not live in the military by the code of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Whatever Bradley Manning was telling his friends in person and online, the fellow soldiers who subjected him to faggot-baiting and bullying thought he was just asking for it.

Yet, as Brian Manning himself now admits with a kind of pained recognition, the father bullied his son into joining the Army. Bradley Manning became a soldier, in Brian’s words, “after I twisted his arm. He didn’t want to join. But he needed structure in his life, he was aimless. I knew in my own life that joining the Navy was the only thing that gave me structure, and everything’s been fine since then.” What may have given structure to the father destroyed the son.

This is the closed circle of our national and personal fictions. But these are fictions with real force. Otherwise our vast national military cemeteries would cease filing away dead young men and women in neat, endless rows. Year after year, war after war, we witness the destruction not only of the enemy but also of our own social order; and we create the kind of social mayhem that makes scared and humiliated people long for the structure of fundamentalist faith, or the structure of a familiar and brutal class system, or the structure of uniforms and military music and the best weapons money can buy. If we contemplated these fields of dead soldiers without illusions, our hearts would break and we might go mad; if we recognized at long last the greed and presumption of the ruling class, then we might hear and know the real burden of these words, which the poet Wilfrid Owen wrote before dying as a soldier and an officer in World War I:



"My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est,
Pro patria mori."

[Editor’s note: The Latin phrase translates roughly as “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”]

If Manning’s mind was fractured, then (as the paradox is known in the Latin liturgy), felix culpa! If guilty as charged, then Manning is one of the people who helped fracture the state secrets of an anti-democratic bipartisan regime that keeps racking up and tracking down ever more political “suspects”—even while career politicians carry out imperial wars with ever more expensive high-tech weapons. The “intelligence” that Manning is charged with passing to WikiLeaks turned out to be one of the inspirations for the Arab rebellions across the Middle East and North Africa; and there has been a real earthquake in the fields of mass media and journalism, with aftershocks following almost weekly. If the traditional guardians of the daily news so deeply resent Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks, that is because they long ago traded away integrity and independence in the sly scramble for “access” to power, press conferences and photo opportunities.

Show me a human being without fractures and I’ll show you a robot. The well-adjusted and uniformed creature sitting at a computer can now pick out targets on command, and thousands of miles away a drone can direct missiles at a bunker (presumably) filled with terrorists (presumably). And yet these presumptions have proved false whenever the missiles drop on Afghan wedding guests, or any other “collateral” civilians unlucky enough to be in the vicinity of intended targets.

As Laura King of the Los Angeles Times reported from Kabul on May 29, “A new dispute over civilian deaths erupted Sunday when Afghan officials claimed an errant NATO airstrike had killed 14 people, women and children among them.” Afghans in the area claimed that of the 14 killed, 12 were children and two were women. And for those with strong stomachs, there is a video now online showing a truckload of dead children, and a father holding two dead infants in his arms. (See the video and King’s report by clicking here.)

Whatever psychic fractures and subjective states of mind may be featured in the mass media’s Bradley Manning story, there is also an objective social fracture that runs right through our population. That is why different groups of people see and understand honor, treason and loyalty so differently. No doubt some gung-ho, all-American folks (of all sexual persuasions, some in uniform) will find no problem with the “Frontline” show or with The Guardian video coverage. But people who have spent much of their lives building movements of resistance will not be viewing and hearing the ready-made psychoanalysis of Bradley Manning with uncritical minds. Some of us even remember the days when gay activists fought the “expert” knowledge enshrined in such a scripture as the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

If by any chance I turn up on a “suspect” list at the airport this June when I try to fly to Europe, no doubt the agents who guide me to a fluorescent cube will have a neat file ready for reference, listing the dozen or more times I enjoyed the hospitality of the state behind bars. (See footnote at the end of this article.) And perhaps this file will be padded with a “psychological profile.” So yes, I confess that I have my own personal and political reasons for defending Manning.

Obama told the whole nation, “He broke the law.” Well, say no more. Obama was once a teacher of constitutional law, but now he has become the Public Prosecutor in Chief against a prisoner, Bradley Manning, who had already been stripped naked under “suicide watch” in a military prison. Under increasing international protest and pressure, the authorities later transferred Manning from Quantico, Va., to Leavenworth, Kan.—by all accounts, a milder regime.
 
Under such conditions, Manning’s mind may truly fracture. If they keep him in jail for 10, 20 or 30 years—or for life under the charge of treason—yes, he may truly lose his mind. Or else he must cultivate patience and fierce clarity, even to survive day by day. Predictably, some folks on the far right (including that preacher of capitalism and Christian love, Mike Huckabee) have demanded Manning’s execution.

Concluding that Manning “was probably not fit for overseas duty” is breathtaking! Yes, this oracular wisdom comes from “progressive” venues such as “Frontline” and The Guardian, and was then paraphrased on Truthdig. As Susie Day, a lesbian writer who is no friend of empire, wrote to me, “The whole fakakta-osity of this b’cast wasn’t only showing Manning as infantilized and unstable; look at the ‘friends’ they got to talk about him—and his father’s the one who belongs in prison; he obviously has such contempt for a kid who, surrounded by such dolts, did well to survive.” Manning has indeed done more practical good in the fight against war and empire than the great majority of “pragmatic” bleeding hearts will ever do by voting as instructed by MSNBC, The Nation and deadbeat Democrats in Washington.

On May 27 I wrote back to Susie Day about the “Frontline” show, “If there were hours enough, I might write a short Truthdig piece pointing out that plenty of queer viewers (and smart straight folks) will NOT have seen Manning through that lens.” Little did I know then that the “Frontline” view of Manning would then become the basic story for a video reporter at The Guardian! When I got that piece of news through Truthdig, then I was obliged to make time to write this article—longer than I first had in mind, but I am now moved by further evidence and by indignation. And by real concern that Manning is being reduced to a figure viewed through the keyhole of the mass media. Indeed, The Guardian video opens with a s-l-o-o-o-w pan of Bradley Manning at a party full of hipsters and computer hackers, where he looks like a clean-cut choirboy.

That bit of film was lifted from a video taken by someone at the party, and became one of the most telling moments in the “Frontline” story. An editorial decision was made at “Frontline” to slow down the moment when Manning looks at the camera and flirtatiously passes his hand over his hair. Given the slow-motion treatment and the voice-over commentary, Manning’s gender-bending bit of fun was then reframed as another piece in the puzzle of his troubled mind. Indeed, this becomes another piece of evidence that Manning was “unfit” to serve in the military. The Guardian simply could not resist opening its own story with the same slow-motion panning of Manning.
 
But is Manning truly “guilty as charged”? We do not really know for sure. After all, he has not yet had his “day in court,” though he has already done hard time in prison. If Bradley Manning broke ranks with war and empire, then thank God (and all the fairies in Bradley’s bonnet) that he was truly fit to tear down the public veil of illusions concerning Alpha Male high-tech killers and the commander in chief.

What makes any person “fit” to win the White House nowadays? From now till kingdom come—if we, the people, are too jaded or too distracted to care—the job description should be spelled out in bold legal print: “Only social climbers willing to rise on a mountain of corpses need apply.”

The first political group I ever joined was the War Resisters League. When I later became a socialist (after my anarchist years as a teenager), this call to action worked its way under my skin as I pondered the real implications of a class-conscious fight against imperial adventures of all kinds: “War against war!” What does war against war really mean? Not one bloody vote and not one bloody cent for the parties of war and empire! That is, for starters, the negative program.

War against war does not mean we volunteer to be shot down by offering the government the provocation of taking up weapons. Violence is an abyss, and we do not show courage by jumping into an open grave. Resistance, however, can take a thousand forms that do not depend on brute force. The war against war must therefore be grounded in ethics, and guided by daily enlightenment. War against war means this government can no longer depend—smugly and brutally—on the uncontested consent of the governed.

A class-conscious struggle against the corporate state is also a struggle against war and empire. If this government makes the free election of real democrats and of socialists impossible, then we, the people, have the right and duty to elect ourselves as public citizens; and to begin creating a new republic founded upon peace, social wealth, ethical obligation, ecological sanity, and the solidarity of labor across all borders. Every workplace is potentially a free council of workers; every street and neighborhood is potentially a public space of freedom.

In Europe, many thousands of working people have already taken to the streets against the austerity programs imposed by parties of the earnest right and the bogus left. What we may call the political warm spring in Europe may yet become a hot summer. In Greece, workers and students waged a general strike, and in Spain they still occupy public squares—recently braving an assault by riot police swinging shields and truncheons against citizens who peacefully linked arms in a mass sit-down protest in Barcelona. We, too, have a history of urban general strikes in this country, and of class-conscious struggles against war and corporate rule. This government depends on our obedience, but our lives depend on open rebellion. Start small and start now.

Footnote: When I speculate about possible detention at an airport, that may suggest paranoia even to some readers who consider themselves civil libertarians. Anyone with a political arrest record (mine is pretty long) has to consider the possibility. And in fact reality is way ahead of my speculation, as a report from Courage to Resist will confirm. That story goes back to November 2010 and concerns an associate of Bradley Manning, David House, who hopes Manning gets a fair trial. House, who is also associated with the Bradley Manning Support Network, was detained at O’Hare Airport, and his laptop computer and other electronic gear were confiscated. The ACLU argued that House’s First and Fourth Amendment rights were violated.

The Jewish Path to Success

By Adam Bellow
Published in The Jewish Daily: Forward 01.08.2003.


The news that Senator Joseph Lieberman had his two children on the campaign payroll as fundraisers with six-figure salaries raised some concerned eyebrows last month in the American Jewish community. Sure, Matt and Rebecca Lieberman are hard and effective workers, and since then have even taken a conspicuous pay cut — but couldn’t their father get them a job in a less conspicuous place?

The Connecticut senator, though, is only doing what dozens of other politicians have been doing of late: bringing his children into the family business.

To be honest, Jews aren’t really upset about the fact that Lieberman hired his children or even that he paid them high salaries. The discomfort with the personnel choices of the first Jewish candidate to make a serious run at the presidency is that his behavior is subjected to a higher level of scrutiny by the general public. In a word, what Jews fear is how it looks to the goyim: clannishness and underlying hypocrisy about meritocracy and nepotism.

What’s that, you say? Hypocrisy? Most Jews would probably tell you that they find the very idea of nepotism abhorrent and unfair.

After all, haven’t Jews been at the forefront of the liberal revolution, insisting on equality of rights and opportunity not just for themselves but for other minority groups? Haven’t Jews championed the principle of merit, supported affirmative action, attacked the idea of restrictive quotas and legacy admissions, and striven to overcome the impression that they are clannish and insular?

All true. But at the same time, like other immigrant groups, Jews have relied first and foremost on familial resources to adapt, survive and prosper in America.

In the mid-19th century, when the first wave of German Jews arrived, itinerant peddlers named Seligman, Guggenheim, Levi, and Straus built their pushcart businesses into enormous dry-goods empires, bringing their relatives over to run their chain department stores. Later on, excluded from the white-shoe legal and financial firms of Wall Street, the Lehman, Kuhn, Loeb, Sachs and Goldman families created their own.

When millions of Russian and East European Jews arrived in the 1880s and 1890s, established Jewish families — obeying the ancient injunctions to Jewish charity enshrined in the Mosaic code — constructed an elaborate welfare system, including hospitals, orphanages, settlement houses and trade schools. Most of these immigrants went into the booming garment industry, putting their whole families to work and giving rise to a thriving ethnic economy in which Jewish factory owners employed Jewish workers to create goods sold by Jewish merchants to Jewish customers.

The immigrants also created dozens of landsmanschaft organizations that helped bring over new immigrants, settled them in jobs and provided welfare services for widows and orphans. Such communal and family ties lent solidarity and strength to the heavy Jewish presence in the labor movement.

During the 1920s and 1930s a group of hard-nosed Jewish entrepreneurs turned a patch of desert near Los Angeles into the Hollywood movie industry. Entertainment juggernaut Paramount Pictures, founded in 1919 by Adolph Zukor, was financed by an enormous loan from the Jewish Wall Street firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. — thanks to the intervention of Otto Kahn, brother of Zukor’s partner Felix Kahn. The studios were famed for their nepotism.

Jewish families also went into the media business, founding Random House, Knopf, Simon & Schuster and other distinguished publishing houses. And the Sulzberger-Ochs clan has owned and run The New York Times since 1896.

During the Depression, Jewish families pulled together once again, outdoing other groups in solidarity and mutual support. After World War II, Jews gained access to the middle class and moved to the suburbs, leaving their ethnic roots behind them. Yet Jews did not disperse throughout the economy like other immigrants but continued to congregate in medicine, law, academia and the communications industry, where relatively high numbers have afforded leverage and security.

Speaking at a recent seminar on Jewish women in television at New York’s Jewish Museum, Terri Minsky, creator of the hit series “Lizzie McGuire,” unapologetically remarked: “I got into TV the way I thought all Jewish people did — I had an uncle in the business.”

How can we square this long record of familial and ethnic nepotism with the public insistence of Jews on equal opportunity and merit? While most would surely point to the long Jewish tradition of social idealism, a more practical reason may be found in the disproportionate benefit Jews derive from a meritocratic system.

But this genial hypocrisy is tempered by the fact that Jewish nepotism has always been meritocratic. For thousands of years, Jews have placed enormous value on learning and education, and Jewish parents have insisted on high standards of achievement for their children. This longstanding habit gave Jews an edge over other groups and enabled immigrants to escape the ghetto much faster, within one or two generations.

Lieberman’s nepotism seems to call into question the whole Jewish commitment to meritocracy. A similar scandal erupted in 1983, when Bess Myerson, appointed as New York City’s cultural affairs commissioner by her old friend Mayor Ed Koch, gave a job to Sukhreet Gabel, the emotionally-disturbed daughter of the family court judge assigned to Myerson’s divorce case. Jews were outraged, though not so much by the seriousness of the offense as by Myerson’s failure to uphold the communal honor: how could the Jewish Miss America behave like any other politician?

Has Lieberman embarrassed himself or his supporters by hiring his children? Not at all. To the contrary, he is a good father and family man who is doing proudly and openly what generations of Jews have done before him. The whole history of American Jewry is a tribute to the power of Jewish nepotism. Indeed, nepotism has been a positive and wholesome force in Jewish life for thousands of years. It is high time to acknowledge and even celebrate this fact instead of trying to keep it hidden like a shameful family secret.


Adam Bellow is the author of “In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History” (Doubleday).